Beppie Harrison

Ireland is easy to fall in love with. Beppie Harrison first viewed it from across the Irish Sea when she went to London when she married her English husband, but the poetry and good times and tragedy of Ireland has captured her heart, and her visits there in the years since have done nothing to discourage her. She writes about the uneasy relationship between the ruling English—even the Anglo-Irish who made Ireland their home for many generations—and the restless Irish people, who did not take happily to their role as the first colony of England. But over the centuries there were inevitably times when people reached out to each other in spite of the gulf between them, and those are the relationships she writes about. Like them, Beppie finds both the English and the Irish bewildering and endearing. She now lives in Massachusetts with her husband and three cats and two dogs who tolerate them as long as fed regularly. Their children have all flown the coop.